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I have a little problem. I'm addicted to cookbooks, food writing, recipe collecting, and cooking. I have a lot of recipes waiting for me to try them, and ideas from articles, tv, and restaurants often lead to new dishes. I started losing track of what I've done. So now I'm taking photos and writing about what I've prepared—unless it's terrible in which case I forget it ever happened.

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Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Fresh, local vegetables inspired a southern vegetarian meal that started with watermelon margaritas and fried okra. For the main course, I turned once again to the book Local Flavors in which Deborah Madison creates a summer vegetable stew that combined all the local vegetables I had on hand. The stew also incorporates fresh shell beans which are beans that are too large to be eaten in their pods and not yet fully dried. Some typical shell beans are borlotti, white runner beans, and cranberry beans, and soybeans and purple-hull beans can be eaten this way too. Purple-hull beans are a common Texas crop, and they’re available right now in their fresh form. Shell beans do not require soaking and cook in about 30 to 40 minutes. With my CSA vegetables, locally grown beans, and homegrown herbs, I had what I needed for a summer stew.

Sticking with the southern theme, cornbread was a natural to go with the stew, and this was a great excuse to use my cast-iron corn stick mold. My Mom gave this pan to me a couple of years ago, and I hadn’t gotten around to using it, but I love it because it’s something I have in common with Jacques Pepin. In Chez Jacques, in the story about fried chicken and cornbread, he describes a cast-iron cornbread mold with seven corn-shaped indentations which is exactly like mine. So, he wrote a recipe for cornbread that makes just enough batter to fill that mold, but he admits he sometimes has extra that he bakes separately in a small pan. I followed his recipe which interestingly involved separating eggs, frothing egg whites, and then folding them into the batter. I ended up with a little more batter than I needed and baked a small square of cornbread in addition to the molded sticks.

Preparing the stew was a simple process of adding the vegetables in the correct order for cooking times and seasoning each layer as it was added. To begin, olive oil was warmed in a Dutch oven over low heat, and bay leaves from my struggling to survive tree were added. Then big chunks of onions and halved garlic cloves were added with thyme sprigs and sage leaves. That was covered and left to cook while the rest of the vegetables were cleaned and chopped. Then, carrots were added followed by potatoes and then green beans. Big strips of bell pepper and thick pieces of pattypan squash went on top of all of that, and last but not least were tomatoes with their juices. That was all left to simmer for about an hour while the purple-hull beans cooked with some garlic and thyme. When the shell beans were cooked, they were added with their cooking liquid to the stew. A quick basil pesto was made to garnish each serving of stew.

Given how little effort went into the layering and simmering of the stew, the resulting flavor was surprisingly good. The herbs had mingled their way through the sauce of the stew and gave it a richness I didn’t expect. The low heat allowed the vegetables to retain their shape and some texture, and the garlic had mellowed to a nice state. By stirring the basil pesto into the bowl of stew, a sharper, brighter herb and garlic flavor was added. It was a fresh, warm bowl of summer, and it couldn’t have asked for better company than the cornbread.

Local Flavors is one of my favorite cookbooks - and I talked Deborah into bringing a copy of the out-of-print-and-unavailable hardback copy to the SSE convention, so now I actually have two copies. Excessive, I know, especially since they're identical except for the binding, but... they're both signed so I hate to part with one. I know, I know... I've been cooking a lot out of the book (made the white pizza with homemade mozzarella last weekend -- go try it!). Your photos here are lovely -- and there's nothing happier than Dutch Oven cooking!

That Deborah Madison! You can always count on her. I LOVE fresh shell beans and they haven't quite come into season here yet. I plan to buy a huge amount of them this year and store them in the freezer. I love having them on hand and I also love how quick they are to prepare. How cute is that cornbread mold?

I call that a 'corn pone pan' dont ask me why - but I dont have one and I always look at them and resist the temptation to put another 5 pound cast iron specific to one thing pan on my shelf - but believe you me before the dust is settled I will own one!